0 0 One year after ,Operation Solomon, Ethiopian Jews must find work , and housing. o LARRY DERFNER Israel Correspondent agalim — The Ethi- opian men didn't like what they were hearing. Nearly 100 of them sat around the "town square" — a sandbox where trees were to have been planted — in their mobile home park on the edge of Magalim, a little rural to in the northern Negev. It was a powerfully hot and dry desert morning, Sunday, May 17. The men, all of whom had been air- lifted to Israel on Operation Solomon a year ago, were be- ing told that their year of "freedom" — free housing, free Hebrew classes, free health care and child care, plus sizable stipends and no pressing need to find work — was about to come to an end. "You're going to have to save your money," Yossi Mograbi, head of the mobile Are the roughly 14,000 Ethiopians from Operation Solomon ready to make a go of it when aid runs out? n Their Own home park for the Jewish Agency told the men. "In June or July you're going to have to pay for electricity, gas, water, you're going to have to eat, drink, travel, put your kids in school. You're going to have to look for jobs. Yes, I know it's dif- ficult, I know there's unemployment." A group of Ethiopian wo- men in headdresses and long robes walked by. The rest were at home, their children in nurseries or school. Nine hundred and thirty Ethiopi- an immigrants from Opera- tion Solomon live in the park's 140 identical, gray mobile homes, or "caravans," which are lined up in rows alongside empty roads and sandlots. Mr. Mograbi went on talking to the men: "You're going to have to find apartments to buy — we can't bring them to you — or you'll waste your mon- ey paying rent here. If you stay in your homes or walk around doing nothing, you'll get bored and there will be problems. Help the gardener out, clean up the street. It looks terrible. This is your home, your self-respect. "And please don't come to us with every problem. We used to have 20 assistants, plus two social workers, an activities coordinator, three house mothers and an em- ployment counselor. Now there are five of us altogeth- er for nearly a thousand of you. So if there's a problem between neighbors, or be- tween husband and wife, we can't solve it anymore. Learn to accept the answer `no' like you accept the an- swer 'yes.' " Many of the immigrants complained that they weren't ready for this, not all at once. Speaking through an Amharic inter- preter, Mr. Mograbi, who, from all accounts, gets along well with the Ethiopians, told them: "For over six months I've tried to prepare you for this day, and now this day has arrived." A year after Operation So- lomon (May 24-25, 1991), the 14,000 Ethiopians in the air- lift, and the roughly 3,000 who have followed, are not ready to make it in Israel on their own. Mr. Mograbi, who insists that he is "quite op- timistic" about the Ethiopi- ans' future, estimates that "maybe 10 percent" of them know enough Hebrew to function in Israeli society, after having taken a 10- month, 5-hour-a-day Hebrew Ulpan. A sizable minority are unable to read or write Amharic, their native lan- guage. Micha Feldman, one of the heroes of Operation Solo- mon and now head of the Jewish Agency's Ethiopian immigrants department, says he was "amazed, in a positive way" to learn that 2,056 of the immigrants now have jobs — mainly as farmworkers, cleaners and factory hands — or are in job-training courses. (Most of the immigrants were farmers in northern Ethio- pia's Gondar province, where the Jews were concen- trated.) Yet at Magalim, one of 15 caravan parks where Ethio- pians have been living (ei- ther separately, or in- tegrated with Russian im- _ migrants and young Israe- lis), one man has found a job as a mechanic, and 10 young women have just begun picking flowers. That's it. Mr. Mograbi is negotia- ting with a rug factory and agricultural combine to give them jobs, but, as he told the men at the meeting, "I'm not promising any- thing." Those who don't get jobs will be eligible for free job-training courses. If history is a teacher, most of them won't find work. The flow of Ethiopian Jews to Israel began in the late 1970s, and over 25,000 had arrived before Opera- tion Solomon. Among these veteran immigrants, esti- mates of the unemployment rate range from 40 to 80 per- cent. The job market awaiting the newest im- migrants is tight, with gen- eral unemployment at an all- time high of nearly 12 per- cent. Israel and world Jewry are giving the Ethiopians a tre- mendous amount of aid. Be- THE DETROIT JEWISH NEWS 47